Lowell Liebermann


Lowell Liebermann is an American composer, pianist and conductor.

Early Life and Education

Liebermann began piano lessons at the age of eight and began composing shortly after. He credits his second piano teacher, Ada Sohn Segal with instilling a love of music in him. At the age of 13 he declared his desire to be a composer and at the age of 14 began composition lessons with Ruth Schonthal, a Hindemith pupil. He composed his first Piano Sonata at the age of 15 and performed it at Carnegie Recital Hall a year later. He continued his studies at the Juilliard School, where he received a BM, MM and DMA, studying composition with David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti and piano with Jacob Lateiner.  He also studied conducting privately with Laszlo Halasz and spent a year between his Bachelor and Master degrees serving as assistant conductor to Halasz.

Career and Works

One of Liebermann’s earliest successes was the Sonata for Flute and Piano Op.23, commissioned by the Spoleto USA Festival for flautist Paula Robison and pianist Jean Yves Thibaudet, a work which has gone on to become one of the most frequently performed sonatas in the flute repertoire. The was followed soon after by his Gargoyles Op.29 for piano, a work which has become a staple of the solo piano repertoire. The Steinway & Sons piano company commissioned Liebermann’s 2nd Piano Concerto to celebrate the 500,00th Steinway piano built, and that work had its premiere at the Kennedy Center in 1992 with Stephen Hough as pianist and Mstislav Rostropovitch conducting the National Symphony. It was subsequently recorded along with Liebermann’s 1st Piano Concerto for Hyperion with Hough and the composer conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony and was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category. The success of Liebermann’s Flute Sonata led flautist Sir James Galway to commission Liebermann’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra Op.39, followed by commissions for the Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra Op.48 as well as the first Trio for Flute Cello and Piano. Galway subsequently recorded Liebermann’s concertos for Flute, Piccolo and Flute & Harp with Liebermann conducting the London Mozart Players. Liebermann’s first opera The Picture of Dorian Gray was the first American opera commissioned and premiered by the Monte Carlo Opera, in 1996. In 1999 Liebermann was appointed as composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony, a residency which included the premiere of his 2nd Symphony, commissioned for the orchestra’s centennial in 2000. That concert marked the first time a major orchestra broadcast a concert over the internet. In 2001 Liebermann was the Grand Prize winner of the Inaugural American Composers Invitational of the 11th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, after the majority of semi-finalists chose to perform Liebermann’s work Three Impromptus Op.68 for their final round recitals. Liebermann’s second opera, Miss Lonelyhearts,  to a libretto by J.D. McClatchy based on Nathanael West’s novel, was commissioned by The Juilliard School as the final event in its centennial celebration. In 2012 Liebermann was invited to join the composition faculty of the Mannes College of Music at which time he became the founding conductor of MACE, a large ensemble devoted to the works of living American Composers. A year later, Liebermann was appointed head of the composition department, a position he held for five years. In 2014, Liebermann became the first recipient of the Virgil Thomson Award, a $40,000 prize given jointly by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Virgil Thomson Foundation, for the entirety of his vocal output.
The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden and San Francisco Ballet jointly commissioned Liebermann’s first full-length ballet, Frankenstein, premiered in London in 2016. In 2020, Liebermann was commissioned by Steinway & Sons for a second time, to compose a work for piano duet which was presented as a wedding present to the pianists Lang Lang and Gina Alice Redlinger after their wedding at the Palace of Versailles in Paris.
Liebermann’s catalogue of works runs to over 130 opus numbers, including 4 Symphonies; 3 Piano Concertos and a Rhapsody On a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra;  concertos for violin, cello, clarinet, and trumpet; chamber works including 3 piano trios, a quartet and quintet for piano and strings; 5 cello sonatas and 5 string quartets; works for solo piano including 3 Piano Sonatas and eleven Nocturnes; and many works for voice with piano or chamber combinations.

Musical Characteristics

Liebermann has cited as early compositional influences Bach, Beethoven, Britten Shostakovich, Frank Martin, Faure and Busoni. Liebermann’s music has been described by some critics as “neo-romantic,” while critic Terry Teachout included Liebermann in a group of composers he dubbed “The New Tonalists”. Liebermann has at times expressed his discomfort with these labels. Richard Freed in the Grove Dictionary gives a more nuanced assessment of Liebermann’s style: “Liebermann’s music is notable for its stylistic resourcefulness and polished craftsmanship. It resists definition with any particular school of composition. While his earliest works were chromatic and contrapuntal in texture, often verging on atonality, the Sonata notturna brought clearer harmonic direction, with an emphasis on formal articulation and thematic unity.” Liebermann’s music is indeed often tonal but also employs bitonality, atonality, modalism, aspects of serialism and makes use of octatonic and other synthetic scales.

List of Works

; Opera and Ballet:
; Orchestra:
; Wind Ensemble:
; Instrumental Chamber Music:
; Keyboard Music :
; Vocal and Choral Music:

Selected Discography

  1. Hanol Baek / Michigan State University: "Lowell Liebermann’s “Nocturnal” Evolution from Piano Sonata No.2, Op.10 “Sonata-Notturna” to Nocturne No.11, Op.112"; 2019.
  2. Adam Clark / University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music: "Modern Marvels: A Pedagogical Guide to Lowell Liebermann's Album for the Young Op.43"; 2008.
  3. Hsiao-Ling Chang / University of North Texas: "Lowell Liebermann's Concerto No.1 for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 12: An Historical and Analytical Study"; 2010.
  4. Jeannine Dennis / University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music: "The Life And Music Of Lowell Liebermann With An Emphasis On His Music For The Flute And Piccolo"; 1999.
  5. Yanbing Dong / University of Nebraska-Lincoln: "The Imagery of Evil in Modern Piano Works: Exploring the Diabolical Elements in N. Lincoln Hanks' "Monstre Sacre" and Lowell Liebermann's "Gargoyles""; 2017.
  6. Ann Marie DuHamel / University of Iowa: "Magical, dissonant, fantastic beauty: the solo piano nocturnes of Lowell Liebermann"; 2014.
  7. Lisa Garner / Rice University: "Lowell Liebermann: A Stylistic Analysis and Discussion of the Sonata For Flute and Piano, Op.23, Sonata for Flute and Guitar, Op.25 and Soliloquy for Flute Solo, Op.44"; 1997
  8. Christie Glaser / California State University-Long Beach: "The Liebermann Piccolo Concerto and its stylistic elements"; 2013
  9. Milena Gligic / University of Maryland: “Unusual Soundscapes: Chamber Ensembles of the Twentieth Century and Beyond Involving the Collaborative Pianist”; 2017
  10. Martin Harvey / West Virginia University: "The Eleven Nocturnes for Solo Piano of Lowell Liebermann: A Field-Chopin-Faure Lineage"; 2013
  11. Pamela Joy Hatton / University of Colorado-Boulder: "The presence of the past: intertextuality and structural remaking in Lowell Liebermann's Variations on a Theme by Anton Bruckner"; 2013
  12. Andrea Isaacson / The University of Oklahoma: "The Piano Sonatas of Lowell Liebermann: A Performer's Analysis"; 2015
  13. Hansol Kang / The University of Texas at Austin: "Imagery in Lowell Liebermann's opus 29 'Gargoyles' for piano: Interval-ratio generation through multi-tonal articulations"; 2016.
  14. Karen S. Kenaston / University of North Texas: "An Approach to the Critical Evaluation of Settings of the Poetry of Walt Whitman: Lowell Liebermann's Symphony No. 2"; 2003
  15. Mayumi Kikuchi / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: "The Piano Works Of Lowell Liebermann: Compositional Aspects In Selected Works"; 1999.
  16. Ji Young Lee / University of Cincinnatti: "A Style Study of Sergei Rachmaninoff's and Lowell Liebermann's Rhapsodies on a Theme of Paganini"; 2015.
  17. Meng-Hua Lin / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: "A stylistic analysis of piano sonatas by Lowell Liebermann"; 2015.
  18. Marek Lipiec / I J Paderewski Academy of Music, Posnan, Poland: “Dialectical concept of Lowell Liebermann’s musical language - coincidentia oppositorum in selected chamber works”; 2019
  19. Lisa McArthur / University of Kentucky: "Lowell Liebermann: His Compositional Style As Derived From Three Flute Works And Applied To Other Selected Instrumental Works"; 1999.
  20. Jessica Murdoch / University of Northern Colorado: “Night music: The twentieth century nocturne in piano teaching”; 2012
  21. Dean Alan Nichols / University of Kentucky: "A Survey of the Piano Works of Lowell Liebermann"; 2000.
  22. Samuel Nordlund / The University of Alabama: "Motive and Form in Lowell Liebermann's four Sonatas for violoncello and piano"; 2016.
  23. Kathryn L. Rice / University of Nebraska-Lincoln: "Tonal Procedures in Lowell Liebermann's Concerto for Piccolo and Orchestra"; 2017.
  24. Amanda Taylor / Florida State University: “An Exploration of Late Twentieth Century American Flute and Guitar Works with Emphasis on Robert Beaser’s Mountain Songs and Lowell Liebermann’s Sonata for Flute and Guitar”; 2016
  25. Annalee Whitehead / University of Maryland: “A Global Sampling of Piano Music from 1978 to 2005” 2011
  26. Brian J. Winegardner / University of Miami: "A Performer's Guide to Concertos for Trumpet and Orchestra by Lowell Liebermann and John Williams"; 2011.
  27. Tomoko Uchino / The University of Arizona: "An Analysis of Three Impromptus Op.68 by Lowell Liebermann"; 2007.
  28. Wen-Hui Yu / University of Northern Colorado: "A Stylistic Analysis of Piano Concerto No.2,Op.36 By Lowell Liebermann"; 2003.